I think there will be some improvements, nothing game changing, and a few shaves here and there.
I'd be happy just with faster autos, or larger hitboxes. But i doubt it will happen.
I'm expecting some change to conjures and a conjurer trait rework, so that will change nothing for me.
I think there will also be some tempest change.

What really killed this class for me was how easy it is to interrupt. Every skill, it feels, has a long wind-up and cast time, even as a D/D ele player. This allowed thieves with a pistol to just interrupt every single thing, leading me to quit it around the same time damage on interrupt became big.

Want to make Ele better in an easy way that doesn't involve modifying every skill (which is what needs to happen)? They should remove the cooldowns on attunement changes, but keep bonuses from the attunement changes under an ICD. This allows for a bunch of new play, but might not fix everything.

@Mbelch.9028 said:
What really killed this class for me was how easy it is to interrupt. Every skill, it feels, has a long wind-up and cast time, even as a D/D ele player. This allowed thieves with a pistol to just interrupt every single thing, leading me to quit it around the same time damage on interrupt became big.

Want to make Ele better in an easy way that doesn't involve modifying every skill (which is what needs to happen)? They should remove the cooldowns on attunement changes, but keep bonuses from the attunement changes under an ICD. This allows for a bunch of new play, but might not fix everything.

An easy way to make ele better without fixing the cast times and aftercasts would be to give access to a lot of quickness, but that is just a band-aid. Unfortunately, quickness would do nothing to help with the massive dealys that some skills like dragon tooth and ice spike have. In the end they need to look at every single ele skill and ask themselves if their huge wind-ups are justified anymore in the current game. It's simply unavoidable at this point, because no amount of damage buffs will make ele good in the places where it's lacking. You can make shatterstone do 150k damage and it will still be useless against anyone who is even half-competent.

When does this patch comes? End of Nov? Or in the middle of it and a next small one when the Season starts?
My problem with ele, both in PvE and PvP is that you cant really desing a build that gives you less damage but a lot of sustain while still capable of doing damage. With this i mean that the two "meta" non-support classes (boonbeast, and the weird boon holo) has access to both damage modify traits and offensive ones in the same traitline. Even if weaver or even core ele would get quickness into its traits(i can only imagine it in air, or maybe arcane) that woudnt fix the problem since its just one boon. For example if core ele gets a good quickness trait into its air traitline and a tempest uses it you get good protection uptime combined with good damage + the auras, but the thing with that is you dont really have a choice to do this in the middle, so if you go offensive you are locked there for X seconds because of the attune, if you go into defensive your damage will be very limited because you are locked again.
I dont know how to solve the PvP side of the weakness of ele. But in PvE ele just needs more traits that gives defensive and offensive benefits too, this is only my opinion about it

@Nepster.4275 said:
When does this patch comes? End of Nov? Or in the middle of it and a next small one when the Season starts?
My problem with ele, both in PvE and PvP is that you cant really desing a build that gives you less damage but a lot of sustain while still capable of doing damage. With this i mean that the two "meta" non-support classes (boonbeast, and the weird boon holo) has access to both damage modify traits and offensive ones in the same traitline. Even if weaver or even core ele would get quickness into its traits(i can only imagine it in air, or maybe arcane) that woudnt fix the problem since its just one boon. For example if core ele gets a good quickness trait into its air traitline and a tempest uses it you get good protection uptime combined with good damage + the auras, but the thing with that is you dont really have a choice to do this in the middle, so if you go offensive you are locked there for X seconds because of the attune, if you go into defensive your damage will be very limited because you are locked again.
I dont know how to solve the PvP side of the weakness of ele. But in PvE ele just needs more traits that gives defensive and offensive benefits too, this is only my opinion about it

The balance pass has not been announced yet, but it is assumed to come on November the 13th with the new PvP additions. I imagine that we will hear more about the patch in an announcement to come in less than a day. Then we should know if the balancing is truly coming next week.

Elementalist is possibly lacking in a lot of ways currently, but the developers just can't try to fix every single aspect of it at once or it may suddenly become OP. I believe that the best course of action would be to look at every single weapon skill and adjust their cast times/aftercasts/delays in one patch dedicated to only that. Then they can let the meta settle for a bit and do further adjustments to their defensive aspects if necessary.

I hope they'll up the stances :
Aqua stance... of all healing skills; this one is the worst, you need to stay melee, there is a 1sec CD on strikes ... and why it should affect allies ? Is weaver was designed to be dedicated healer ???? kitten .Guard : no icd, no short range, works strong with many traits. Necro : no short range, better initial heal. Like "You need heal ? Keep pressure at melee and don't miss the tick, and you'll get 4k healing _Sure dude, keep believing" Completly ****
Stone *resonance : once again you need healing power + vitality ... count recharge 50sec ...
Unravel : better than before, but only gives one (short) boon ... in the primary attunement ... still clumsy.
Primordial stance : Vulnerability could be 4sec, or more but less charges. Chill1.5sec. Otherwise, it's good.
The trait : 70 sec icd for the passive Stone stance. That applies at same threshold than all "passive panic" traits, it's useless to take more than one. Just replace the stone resonance with Grinding Stones for exemple; give 4sec stab and 1 or 2sec of quickness. Give weaver quickness and I promise I will even play the aqua stance and unravel.

Negative, they make a bunch of small useless bewildering changes again that demonstrates they are still decoupled from the community and continue to base their metrics on dmg meter results/npc meat farms.

At some point either by design or luck they are bound to make an improvement, maybe the 21st patch this year will be the one..

"Any path that narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans do not thread their way through a maze; they scan a vast horizon filled with unique opportunities." - The Spacing Guild Handbook.

Yes, you got me. The last post that I was working on involved fixing this comment as a joke.

@Aigleborgne.2981 said:
Riptide nerf, it still gives ele some sustain, which doesn't belong to anet vision : ele must be very squishy no matter what because this profession is solely dedicated to hardcore masochistic players 😁

Riptide nerf is a pretty safe bet though. If there was an ele balance patch bingo, "riptide nerf" would be the free space. I also won't be surprised if it turns out that ele will benefit the least from the upcoming rune and sigil changes.

Till mesmer devs team starts making ele related patches :
1. Rework of something benchmark golem related that will nerf us in pvp/wvw.
2. Riptide combo nerf cause why not? Nobody use this s*** in pve. We run for years mender for no reason in pvp.
3. 10000% damage buff to pvp spoon skill's ...I mean that sword thing...still will be impossible to kill good naked SB running berserker in less than hour...
4. Oh yea and shatterstone buff...
5. Dagger weaver buffs that nobody asked for or really cares (but who knows maybe they over buff it to oblivion this way)
6. Tempest will stay as meme in pvp.

Am I the only one that cringes everytime I use shatterstone because they NEVER changed the sound fx to match the skill duration? They changed it 3 years ago and It STILL uses the 3 second sound effect.

I hope they make it so like water traits (all the element trait lines) or whatever effect more than just water skills. Like add some support to my whole build not just in 1/4th of my skills. The skills are watered down (no pun intended) already because of having twice as many weapon skills, we don't need the trait boosts being less effective than they are for other classes. Let me deal damage or have some kind of offensive support within water if I build for it, instead of giving me traits that say kitten like "deal 10% more damage when attuned to water, while they have vulnerability". Like what the heck is with that. Its not like a straight 10% increase of damage for water skills is going to break the game. Take the whole vulnerability pre-condition away. Let my fire traits add burning to skills that aren't fire magic, like If I can wield all the elements at once and I have weaver as an elite spec, and ur telling me I can't burn people with rocks or lightening, get the heck out of here.

Am I the only one that cringes everytime I use shatterstone because they NEVER changed the sound fx to match the skill duration? They changed it 3 years ago and It STILL uses the 3 second sound effect.

@ScottBroChill.3254 said:
I hope they make it so like water traits (all the element trait lines) or whatever effect more than just water skills. Like add some support to my whole build not just in 1/4th of my skills. The skills are watered down (no pun intended) already because of having twice as many weapon skills, we don't need the trait boosts being less effective than they are for other classes. Let me deal damage or have some kind of offensive support within water if I build for it, instead of giving me traits that say kitten like "deal 10% more damage when attuned to water, while they have vulnerability". Like what the heck is with that. Its not like a straight 10% increase of damage for water skills is going to break the game. Take the whole vulnerability pre-condition away. Let my fire traits add burning to skills that aren't fire magic, like If I can wield all the elements at once and I have weaver as an elite spec, and ur telling me I can't burn people with rocks or lightening, get the heck out of here.

All specs are too focused on the respectives attunements and weapons skills, not on utility skills or "general". It seems obvious "fire spec" "water spec" But you don't have in Warrior "hammer spec, and if you swap weapon all your skills and traits become weak or ineffective"

@ScottBroChill.3254 said:
I hope they make it so like water traits (all the element trait lines) or whatever effect more than just water skills. Like add some support to my whole build not just in 1/4th of my skills. The skills are watered down (no pun intended) already because of having twice as many weapon skills, we don't need the trait boosts being less effective than they are for other classes. Let me deal damage or have some kind of offensive support within water if I build for it, instead of giving me traits that say kitten like "deal 10% more damage when attuned to water, while they have vulnerability". Like what the heck is with that. Its not like a straight 10% increase of damage for water skills is going to break the game. Take the whole vulnerability pre-condition away. Let my fire traits add burning to skills that aren't fire magic, like If I can wield all the elements at once and I have weaver as an elite spec, and ur telling me I can't burn people with rocks or lightening, get the heck out of here.

All specs are too focused on the respectives attunements and weapons skills, not on utility skills or "general". It seems obvious "fire spec" "water spec" But you don't have in Warrior "hammer spec, and if you swap weapon all your skills and traits become weak or ineffective"

My sentiment also, and i think many of us share the same, that has been pointed out several times in the ele concerns thread. Traits need a rework to fit the build's purpose, which is more weapon dependant than attunement dependant. Taking all support traits and gear doesn't make camping water more viable.

A real wish of mine is to have diamond skin become the same as eng purity of purpose where the ele's clears conveit condis. There by giving ele all the boons in the game with out braking boons for the ele class.

@Jski.6180 said:
A real wish of mine is to have diamond skin become the same as eng purity of purpose where the ele's clears conveit condis. There by giving ele all the boons in the game with out braking boons for the ele class.

Less of a prediction more of a want and need.

Yes! Could really use access to boons like quickness, aegis, or resistance. Also, diamond skin needs to be slightly changed. Ele's are more heal bots than tanks- so their health fluctuates dramatically. Instead of keeping above 75%, diamond skin should cleanse based on time, just like how signet of water used to be.

This would be hell of an incredible cool change, I never thought of this but that's so insanely good and easy to implement and fix so many issues with some potential offmeta specs, and I don't even play PvP/WvW! And it wouldn't really break any traits or stuff. You could change unravel to instantly refresh 2 stacks and give some faster recharge while active or something like that. Ah kitten now I will forever feel bad for the current solution as this would make it so much better

Viable != Optimal

Not viable = You only get carried, 10 players with a build as "viable as yours" can't properly do it.

I believe Tempest is going to have a rebound at some point when they decide to look at the class some more. They've indirectly affected Tempest, let's see when they actually affect the profession. Weaver is probably going to stay about the same and core might get a little more love here and there up-til the year's end.

There will be a grand and glorious nothing, or a significant amount of lengthy patch notes that in fact have from 0 to maybe a lil bit of a proper alteration to the game, and next year spring-ish the forums will probably get a 2nd merged mega thread (if even) while half of the fed-up people will have been forum-banned from ele topics due to hating their investment going to the underworld

Add 1 or 2sec ICD on Cleansing water, because of rune of evasion too Op against pure condi builds.
Nerf boons duration in arcane spec.
Nerf all traits on attunement swap to single attunement, like Elemental Attunement; because we all know how powerful are fire spec and air spec in wvw/pvp.
Nerf base healing/factor of Cleansing Wave, because arcane is too op.

@Zhaid Zhem.6508 said:
Add 1 or 2sec ICD on Cleansing water, because of rune of evasion too Op against pure condi builds.
Nerf boons duration in arcane spec.
Nerf all traits on attunement swap to single attunement, like Elemental Attunement; because we all know how powerful are fire spec and air spec in wvw/pvp.
Nerf base healing/factor of Cleansing Wave, because arcane is too op.

And finaly, delete elementalist.

you forgot one important thing - they will increase 15% damage from shatterstone ...

@Zhaid Zhem.6508 said:
Add 1 or 2sec ICD on Cleansing water, because of rune of evasion too Op against pure condi builds.
Nerf boons duration in arcane spec.
Nerf all traits on attunement swap to single attunement, like Elemental Attunement; because we all know how powerful are fire spec and air spec in wvw/pvp.
Nerf base healing/factor of Cleansing Wave, because arcane is too op.

And finaly, delete elementalist.

Nerfing cleansing water would be enough to erase ele from pvp. But it could be fun having only kamikaze unviable builds remaining, and everyone complaining as soon as they see an ele in their team.

@Mbelch.9028 said:
What really killed this class for me was how easy it is to interrupt. Every skill, it feels, has a long wind-up and cast time, even as a D/D ele player. This allowed thieves with a pistol to just interrupt every single thing, leading me to quit it around the same time damage on interrupt became big.

Want to make Ele better in an easy way that doesn't involve modifying every skill (which is what needs to happen)? They should remove the cooldowns on attunement changes, but keep bonuses from the attunement changes under an ICD. This allows for a bunch of new play, but might not fix everything.

There will always be issues with condis so long as there is no way for condi builds to survive.MIrage? Reason its so successful, is because it has the evades and tons of condi builds, making them the gods of condis.

No other class has the kind of combo mesmers have with survivability and condi.Its either you insta burs people down, or you die from a power meta burst instantly, because you lack the tools to outplay them. Condis would have to be like in wow which have good damage but the class would need some survivability or instant cast to not be stunned and then people would cry about how condis cannot be evaded.Im not even sure that condis should be evaded all the time, unless forcing LOS.

Has ele been competitive in spvp with staff, sceptre, dagger/dagger, dagger focus, warhorn in the last year (or more) - no.
Is it widely accepted by the customer base & expert players alike that ele is not competitive in spvp - yes.
How many opportunities has the balance team had in the last year to make simple and effective changes to ele to improve its lot - over 20 patches in the last year.

Pretty Scathing, but pretty accurate. If dev teams in my company failed to fix stuff that was easily implemented and had the potential for huge impact they would be getting questioned hard, its bobby basic sprint planning. (e.g give extra ele 4k hp)

"Any path that narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans do not thread their way through a maze; they scan a vast horizon filled with unique opportunities." - The Spacing Guild Handbook.